The Doctor's Garden: Medicine, Science, and Horticulture in Britain

Abstract

During the peak of interest in botany and plant collecting in Britain from 1760 and 1820, a garden, in Clare Hickman's telling, could be many different things at once: farm, ornament, research center, social space, and menagerie. Productivity provided a common thread. The period under consideration in The Doctor's Garden was also one of imperial expansion that saw the ascendency of an ideology of improvement whereby human beings could, and should, bend nature to better their own lot. Attentive to these larger contexts, Hickman emphasizes the “world beyond the garden gate” to embed British gardens within the economic realities of the time, whether enclosure at home or resource extraction abroad, as well as within the social and cultural trends that motivated their cultivators (1).At the book's core lies a group of medical practitioners, including prominent surgeons, apothecaries, and physicians, who by establishing gardens that blended the functions mentioned above joined a transoceanic “medico-botanic network” at a busy moment in British history and the history of science (2). Such a perspective decenters Kew Gardens, which has occupied much work on late Georgian botany, in favor of gardens operated by professionals outside of the gentry or state bureaucracy that nonetheless contributed to knowledge production and exchange. Given the resources, time, and connections required to construct such spaces, the medical practitioners involved were typically wealthy and possessed institutional support, in contrast to the numerous irregular practitioners who also populated Britain's medical marketplace at the time. John Coakley Lettsom's estate at Grove Hill attracts considerable attention in the text, as do the lesser-studied gardens of John Fothergill, William Pitcairn, John Hunter, and Edward Jenner. In Hickman's eloquent narrative, these men embody the tension visible in their gardens between offering amusement and creating “an economic botany powerhouse, which could be financially valuable for the nation and the wider imperial project” (63). Often what emerged from this tension was a combination of polite and useful knowledge, especially visible in the example of Jenner's Temple of Vaccinia at his garden in Gloucestershire.Readers of this journal will find much to interest them in chapter 5, for example, where Hickman challenges distinctions between botany and agriculture as well as between farm and garden. In the author's view, eighteenth-century medical practitioners were “well placed to take . . . an essential scientific approach to agricultural improvement,” in large part due to their training, which included courses in chemistry, botany, and comparative anatomy (134). Edward Jenner and Humphry Davy, both well known within the medical realm, applied their skills to soil quality and fertilizer during their careers. Such experimentation could help grow medicinally useful plants such as rhubarb, but it also offered the prospect of solving the related problems of unemployment, wealth distribution, and trade deficit that afflicted the health of the nation metaphorically. Gardens offered spaces where these medical practitioners could attempt to devise practical responses to what they witnessed firsthand in their practices, such as the poverty that Lettsom observed in London's East End.Other chapters consider a range of topics rooted in the garden's multifunctional possibilities that nevertheless will appeal to scholars working outside of garden history. An emphasis on the role of the senses in botanical knowledge dissemination illustrates the garden as a teaching and research center intimately connected to the human body. The ways that owners constructed these gardens and allowed visitors required systems of management that, in turn, prompted new forms of labor and “class-based discrimination” as the number of visitors increased (80). How such gardens were presented to the public and cataloged in print also reflected the changing status and expectations of the medical profession by the early nineteenth century, as physicians like Lettsom sought to consolidate their newfound status as polite landowners. An epilogue connects this garden history to the heritage sector today and the future of the discipline of garden history.In addition to reading a variety of sources and the gardens themselves, Hickman pays attention to the archive, including who has been left out of it, as she leads readers through a rich medicinal and ornamental landscape over the book's six chapters. The available sources, however, only offer glimpses of the invisible labor inherent in these landscapes. Likewise, the British state appears obliquely in the account despite its support of so many of the networks discussed here. These open questions of labor and government illustrate some of the ways that The Doctor's Garden draws on the histories of medicine, science, environment, and empire to both advance garden history and contribute a more applied interpretation of gardens to those fields. Historians can expect to see gardens in a new light, as domestic spaces between the field and the laboratory significant for the “development of scientific ideas and practices in the early modern period” and closely tied to larger economic, cultural, and imperial processes (re)shaping Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century (11).